The BP Report Is Out, But What About Its Methodology?

By

Spencer Swartz

Sep 8, 2010 2:24 pm GMT

Analysts, investors and companies are poring over BP’s much anticipated oil-spill report for the company’s take on the causes of the U.S. drilling disaster. But how BP stitched together its 193-page report is also under scrutiny.

A person familiar with the report said the inputs of Transocean, Halliburton and Cameron International in shaping and informing the company’s conclusions were of a “limited nature,” meaning the bulk of interviews, data and information that inform the report came from BP itself. Yet those are all companies BP points the finger at, along with itself, in its paper for responsibility in the drilling disaster.

In a press briefing Wednesday after the report was released, Mark Bly, BP’s safety honcho who spearheaded the company’s investigation, defended the independence of his probe, saying more than half of the roughly 50 experts on his investigation team came from outside the company.

But a quick read of BP’s executive summary indicates the company hardly employed rigorous legal standards in putting together the report and, in fact, acknowledges as much.

Such standards are what various U.S. agencies are having to follow in their own ongoing investigations into the causes and circumstances of the drilling accident.

“The investigation team did not evaluate evidence against legal standards, including but not limited to standards regarding causation, liability, intent and the admissibility of evidence in court or other proceedings,” BP said in the report’s executive summary.

Steve Gordon, a maritime lawyer in Texas who represents some of the oil-worker survivors of the accident, and a family of one of the 11 workers who died, took aim at the lack of sworn testimony from the various people interviewed by BP investigators.